Event Details

Following on from Skillsapien's Virtual Pitch Round 1, the qualifiers will pitch seasoned Silicon Valley investors in a real-time virtual panel, gain valuable feedback and insights and win a chance to pitch live in front of major SV pitch events and investor conferences with a potential to win US$1M in investment!

How it works:

5mins pitch, 5 mins Q&A and feedback from a judging panel of real SV investors and seasoned entrepreneurs. At the end of the event the panel will declare 2 winning finalists

This is Round #2 out of a total of 3 rounds of qualification:

Round 1 (Jan-May): virtual pitches to Steve Austin, a seasoned and trusted SV pitch coach where he has selected 2 companies per heat round; for a total of 8 qualifiers

Round 2 - now: pitch virtually to a panel of real SV investors, the full list of panelists are below

Round 3: the finalists from Round 2 will be sponsored to fly to SV to pitch LIVE at a major SV pitching contest (such as Idea-to-IPO or F50 Season 2), in front of institutional investors, with a chance to win potentially $1M in investments!

- Robert Blair:angel investor; Board Member and former CEO at various SV companies; former CEO of LSI Europe (part of the LSI Group which was the largest tech IPO in 1980's before Microsoft).

- Bernard Slede: MD of Breakthrough Venture Partners; SV CEO advisor; online marketplace specialist responsible for help launching dozens of companies across US and Europe; former Head of Venture Capital at HP and Elf France.

- Canice Wu: Venture Partner at F50; President of Plug-n-Play Tech Centre (SV's first and largest co-working community); angel investor and serial entrepreneur; former founding team member at Siebel Systems; VP at Oracle; founder & CEO of Insights OnDemand.

- Max Shapiro: angel investor affiliated with Keiretsu Forum; host of PitchForce SF; founder and CEO of PeopleConnect - one of the most well-known startup recruitment firms in SV.

A (new) personal true story:

Victor Jiang, founder of Skillsapien.com and a StartNest member, flew to SV in late Oct last year and attended a pitch workshop hosted by Steve that evening (red-eyed after 22 hours of flying). After practising with Steve till 1:30am local time, Victor went on to win an Idea-to-IPO pitch contest – in front of 300+ people and a panel of pro investors, the very next day.

Mike Loftus, of the panel judges, joined Skillsapien’s advisory board within 2 weeks after the event. Mike is now the Venture Partner of the new F50 Fund - a breakthrough in the Silicon Valley seed-funding landscape. With Mike's (and other's) guidance Skillsapien was able to emerge as one of F50 Season 1 Finalists, culminating in a pitch in front of an audience of 1000+ and hundreds of investors at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, earlier this month.